Conservatives Won the War on Crime, but America’s Moral Order Still Needs a Champion

Donald Trump’s acolytes like to say that they are the “silent majority.” They aren’t. By generous estimates, perhaps a quarter of the country wants to see Donald Trump in the Oval Office; he hasn’t been able to command even a majority of Republican voters. It’s a sad statement about our nation today that millions of Americans are nostalgic for Richard Nixon.

Nevertheless, we can understand why they would be. Trump’s following is much smaller than Nixon’s, but his appeal is relevantly similar. He’s brash, angry, and a little bit thuggish. He promises to stick it to the PC liberal elites. As in Nixon’s day, the hard-luck white middle class feels neglected, and Trump is capitalizing on that resentment. The not-so-silent non-majority is still out there, and they want us to know that they’re still angry.

That anger is less potent, though, than in Nixon’s day. Very possibly, there will be just enough of it to lose the White House to Hillary Clinton. Why can’t Jacksonian populism sweep the nation the way it used to? One reason is that America’s demographics have changed. Whites are still a majority in America, but probably not for long. The middle class is shrinking, too. Of course, Trump is also a weaker candidate than Nixon, more like a clownish understudy than a reincarnation.

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Even so, we should acknowledge that he was dealt a worse hand. Populists deal in belligerent language, but Trump’s aggrieved supporters are mainly suffering the consequences of economic change, as well as a cultural decline in which they have been lamentably complicit. It’s hard to spin that into a satisfying aggressor-and-victim narrative.

Trump has made the most of a tough situation by declaring war on illegal immigration and the cult of PC, and by promising to liberate our manufacturing jobs from their Chinese captors. His success has been impressive, but this still isn’t the sort of agenda that can galvanize the whole nation (or even the bigger half). Nixon was blessed with a more promising slate of opponents: drugs and crime. Those are the kinds of demons that can turn a populist demagogue into a viable superhero.

Why can’t crime win elections for us anymore? It used to make a superb mixer for the classic fiscal-responsibility cocktail. Throughout the late 20th century, Democrats lured voters to the polls with promises of treats, while Republicans enumerated the perils of such spoiling. There are obvious downsides to letting your opponents be the nice guys. But for decades we made it work by combining our arguments about taxes and economic growth with gut-level appeals to the public’s fear of gangs, muggings, and playgrounds littered with hypodermic needles. There was a pleasing philosophical consistency to this brew, since the emphasis on personal responsibility extended (at least in principle) from the Fed to the back alley. It was a plausible counterweight to Democratic largesse.

The Democrats still lure voters with promised benefits, but the crime card has largely been neutralized. Without it, the conservative cocktail has grown bland. When conservatives are forever talking about taxes and budget deficits, voters see them as greedy, bloodless, and out of touch. That isn’t a recipe for winning elections. We need better ways to tap into the core concerns of middle-class American voters.

Why can’t crime be our winning issue anymore? One reason is that tough-on-crime memes have fallen prey to their own success. Crime rates have fallen dramatically since the 1990s, and if anything still seem to be dropping. Crime is still a significant concern in some urban areas, but for most of the electorate it’s no longer a major issue. The justice hardliners achieved their stated objectives too effectively to remain electorally relevant.

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Before we get caught up in self-congratulation, though, we should mention the downsides. Our incarceration-heavy penal system has been expensive in both financial and human terms. Over the course of the 1980s and ’90s, our incarceration rate quadrupled as the U.S. claimed the dubious distinction of being the world’s leading jailer. By the mid 2000s, we were spending tens of billions each year to keep about 1 percent of our population behind bars. Americans started to develop a bad conscience about this, particularly in light of the demographic make-up of our inmate population. Impoverished black men are significantly overrepresented in prison, and this fact has contributed further to the decline of the black family, and to already-grim employment rates among less-educated black men.

Even if these disparities can be justified by crime patterns, they certainly aren’t brag-worthy. It’s easy to understand why Americans are ashamed to be viewed globally as Incarceration Nation. It’s also fairly obvious now that the implicit political bargain of the late 20th century (wherein liberals made free to “spoil” us with an expanded social safety net, while conservatives claimed the right to crack down stringently on misbehavior) has been ruinous for America’s poor.

#share#Today, several red states are leading the charge to reform their penal systems, closing some prisons and replacing them with probationary programs designed to help offenders pull their lives together. The watchwords among cutting-edge criminal-justice people today are: smarter, savvier, data-driven. Let’s add up what we know about crime and punishment and figure out how to help people instead of cycling them endlessly though the system.

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That makes sense from the standpoint of public policy. On the electoral stage, though, we still have a problem. In the cast of conservative characters, today’s benevolent technocrats can’t possibly fill the shoes of yesterday’s glowering judges. Tough-on-crime was effective because it tapped into people’s fears of being victimized, but also because it allowed conservatives to be champions of legal and moral order. As the culture declined, people took comfort in conservative assurances that some sort of boundary was still being maintained. Voters won’t get that same reassurance from data-obsessed behaviorists touting state-of-the-art rehab programs.

In many ways, the past decade has exposed the design flaw in the Nixonian strategy of countering Democratic splurges with a war on crime. For already-functional demographic cohorts, generous benefits and punitive statutes combined fairly well to produce order and stability. Among more-fragile populations, it was a different story. The welfare state undermined natural human ties by subsidizing family breakdown and incentivizing vice. “Tough on crime” destabilized things further by locking away a sizable portion of the men.

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Many things have changed since Nixon’s day, but predictably, the liberal component of the 20th-century arrangement has proved the more enduring. The welfare state is like crack. As things get worse, people cling to it all the more tightly. Incarceration, by contrast, is like a plate of greasy fries. We get satiated, then feel sick.

There are a few silver linings here. One is that conservatives are now being forced to confront changes in our political landscape that really affect both parties. It may be that 2016 will be remembered in history as the year when Democrats eked out a victory on an anachronistic platform, while conservatives were forced to start building an agenda with longer-term viability. (Of course, it would be far better to begin such an era under the direction of a young, conservative leader, such as a newly elected President Cruz.)

We should also consider that Americans probably haven’t lost their appetite for moral order. Conservatives need to look for new ways to present themselves as the defenders of the guardrails that hold society together. Criminal justice might still be a component of that equation. Unlike liberals, who tend to view criminal offenders merely as victims of a broken system, conservatives should stress that crime is a moral problem as well as a social one. Offenders should make amends for their crimes as circumstances allow, by serving their communities or paying reparations. Restorative-justice programs have proven beneficial for both offenders and victims.

That surely won’t be enough, however, to reestablish ourselves as the champions of moral order. For that, we need a platform that responds in a more holistic way to the crumbling of our society’s moral and cultural foundation. Such an agenda very obviously could not be credibly presented by a figure like Donald Trump. (Indeed, his nomination would itself do serious damage to the Republicans’ potential to claim that mantle for the foreseeable future.) Conservatives may need to start employing the language of liberation, not only to decry bureaucratic bloat but also to address the need to free ourselves from the pervasive moral and social dysfunction that prevents so many of our citizens from achieving the American Dream.

The war on crime is over, and insofar as conservatives won, they also lost a critical piece of their agenda. But Americans are still looking for heroes who can restore them to greatness. If conservatives are to retain political significance, they must find new ways to establish themselves as protectors of our social and moral order.